Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [33]
Marcus stood and peered into the shopping bags, checked on the floor on either side of the toilet. ‘Where’d the neck-lace go?’
Dad looked about too, even under the walls into the cubicles either side. ‘Huh, what do you know? She took the flowers.’
‘She doesn’t even really like gerberas, she told me.’ Marcus stepped out of the cubicle. A policewoman was standing against the far wall. First a man-cop peeped around the tiled divider-wall, then an army-looking man with little gold crosses on his collar.
‘’S what you made them into, matey.’ Dad picked up the shopping bags with a rattle and followed him out. ‘Worth taking with her up to that wherever-she-went. Heaven or wherever.’
‘Maybe it was the smell you put on them,’ said Marcus, and found himself laughing, following the policewoman out of the toilets.
‘Ha! Maybe it was! Told you the girls loved it, didn’t I?’ And Dad clapped a hand on Marcus’s shoulder, and left it there as they walked down the corridor, and out into the anxious crowd.
{ Night of the Firstlings
Hickory came down with it, same as all the big boys. One minute he was sitting at prayers around the table, the next he hardly looked like himself, he was blotched so red and in between so white.
‘Augh.’ He sounded as if he had no teeth. ‘It’s like something thumped me.’
Dawn beside me was suddenly a little stone boy. I took his hand and we sat and could not blink, while the fuss was made of Hickory and for once we didn’t mind, so long as they got that livid-patched face out of our sight soon, those swollen-up lips. The blokes are always full of bravado; you cannot tell from them. But Mum with her sharp commands and then her tight silences told us well enough: we ought be very frightened. And we were.
We sat there in the silence of the broken-off prayer. The prophet’s children were there too, though his oldest, Nehemi, was home with the same horror.
‘Yer,’ they said. ‘It was just like that for ours, too.’
‘’T in’t any less awful the second time,’ whispered Arfur.
‘They looks like monsters.’
Then the prophet himself was back down among us, and he saw their faces and he went to their bench, gathered up little Carris and allowed the others to cling to him. He laughed across at Dawn and me. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We have the protection. This is what we done all that for.’
It didn’t help, knowing how serious it had been while we hurried about that day with our secret and our buckets of blood. If anyone asks you, Dad had said, tell them it is a Dukka festival, nothing more.
What kinda festival requires good blood slopped about everywhere? I’d said.
It’s lamb’s, Dad said patiently. So a spring festival. But only some springs, tell them, because none of them will have seen it before.
I hoped some of the messier signs we had painted would still work. I remembered adding a few dabs to one of Dawn’s efforts while he ran off down the lane calling back that the Ludoes were down there, with their only one boy—but still that made him the eldest, didn’t it?, and unable to afford a lamb of their own.
Everyone but Mum and Dad came back down, some of them quite scared looking and sweaty. ‘It is just like with my lad,’ I heard one say in the stair. ‘Oh, what a night!’
‘Come, people,’ said the prophet in his prophet-voice. ‘Let us pray thanks that we have the Lord’s protection, this fearful night.’ And they all slid and clambered to around the tables again, and bent their heads.
While he intoned something special and beautiful, nearly singing those words and quite loudly, I bent my head, too, and Dawn leaned against me and I took his hand into my lap. But my attention, which should have been upon God, was wandering up the stair and dabbing about there like the tip of an elephant-trunk, sensitive to the least movement. It was unusual that Dad had not come down to play the host while Mum took care of sick Hickory. It was too too strange that Dawn and I were the only people of our house besides Gramp by the door, while the gathering swayed and responded and